I had a few weeks off in between gigs back in May. I decided I wanted to start this project that had been on my to-do list for a long time and launch this magazine on the anniversary of my brother’s death. After all, how hard could it be to put a digital magazine together from scratch? Three weeks should be plenty. Once again, I overestimated my abilities and underestimated the amount of work that would go into this publication. Regardless, here we are. Better late than never.

June 5th was the four-year anniversary of my little brother Roah’s death.

This issue is dedicated to him.

When I sat down to write about Roah, I had a very clear picture of what I wanted to do. I wanted to write a tribute. I wanted to write about the love he poured out so freely, the childlike warmth that endeared him to everyone he met. I wanted to write about the way he was with my kids, all eight of them, treating every single one like they were his own. I wanted to write about how funny he was. How he could make a room come alive with almost no effort. How he loved to dance, just get up and dance, wherever he was, without a trace of self-consciousness, and how he’d pick up his guitar and play like Eddie Vedder was sitting right next to him and jamming too.

I wanted to talk about how he lived. The joy of him. The warmth of him.

I wanted to avoid the hard parts. The addiction. The failed relationships. The arrests. The particular grinding weight that loving someone like Roah puts on everyone around them, the worry that becomes the background noise of your whole life, the phone calls you dread before they come, the exhausting hope that this time will be different.

After all, it was supposed to be a tribute. Tributes stick to the good parts.

But something told me to go a different route. I’m going to tell the story of Roah’s death.

I’m still going to give you Roah’s light. I’m still going to tell you who he was, because that person was worth knowing, worth mourning, worth every word on these pages. But I’m not going to clean the story up. I’m going to tell it the way it actually happened, because I think there is someone reading this right now who has sat in a hospital or stood in a street or held a phone to their ear and heard the words that change everything. Someone who knows exactly what it costs to love a person the way we loved Roah.

I want this to matter to that person.

The truth is, for all the joy and laughter Roah brought into my life, his last act here on Earth broke my heart, and for a time, crushed my spirit. It made me doubt my calling, my abilities, my motivation. Or maybe it just exposed me.

This is the story of a life that mattered to everyone I love. I’m going to try to do it justice.

It was June 5th, 2022. A Sunday, the kind of California Sunday that feels almost indecently peaceful, all warm light and the smell of cut grass drifting through the Chapel doors. Like most Sundays, I was at church with my family. My older brother Kelly and I are in the same ward, and Sacrament meeting had just released its quiet hold on the morning when Roah’s girlfriend started flooding my phone with 911 texts.

I ignored them at first. There were always 911 texts in Roah’s life. He existed in a world where emergencies were just like the weather: loud, sudden, and usually passing. You learned to read the barometric pressure. You learned when to run and when to wait it out.

I had moved back to California three years earlier after spending about twenty-five years in Utah, a stretch that began with the best of intentions and the worst of timing. I went there at the very beginning of my addiction, convinced that a winter working at Deer Valley and living with my parents would blow the thing clean out of me. I also wanted to be near my little brother Roah, who had just been handed a terminal leukemia diagnosis at an age when most kids were still figuring out how to drive.

That winter turned into 25 years. The mountains were beautiful. Everything else was complicated. Addiction, arrests, loss, and triumph, and then the triumph becoming the former again. Cycles within cycles. But that’s not this story.

I want to go back to Roah.

Roah was the sixth of seven children, the second-to-last, which meant he spent most of his childhood sprinting to keep up with people who had no intention of slowing down. Kelly was nine years older than him. I was six. We did what older brothers do: we tested him constantly, without mercy and without malice, the way you test something you love and want to see survive.

I remember the catcher’s gear. We dressed him up in the full kit, chest protector, shin guards, mask, and then Kelly and I wound up and threw as hard as we could. Not lob it. Throw it. And Roah would just stand there. Maybe a wince every now and then, but mostly just that enormous toothy smile gleaming through the catcher’s mask. It didn’t matter if he caught it clean or took it off the shin, he’d grab the ball, fire it back, and hold up his glove for more. He wanted to be a part of us so badly that he didn’t care about the bruises. He never once asked us to stop. He just kept playing.

“He wanted to be part of us so badly he didn’t care about the bruises. He would just keep playing.”

That was the thing about Roah. He was the kind of tough you can’t manufacture or coach into someone. The kind that comes pre-installed. The kind you discover about a person only when life turns the heat up and they don’t flinch.

He didn’t flinch at the leukemia either. Eleven months of hospitalization. A moving box, a literal moving box, full of medications when they sent him home: fentanyl, oxycodone, liquid morphine. The reasoning was simple, if you could call it that. He was going to die. Might as well keep him comfortable. The only problem, as anyone who knew Roah could have told them, was that he had never once in his life accepted someone else’s ending for him.

He beat the terminal diagnosis. And then the real fight, the one he would eventually lose, began.

I brought him out to a treatment center I was running in California. I had cycled him through quite a few of my programs over the years, enough that walking through intake with Roah had its own rhythm, its own unspoken choreography. We both knew the script. We both hoped, every time, that this would be the one that held.

While he was in treatment, his wife, who had stayed back in Utah to tend to her own unraveling, overdosed and died. The call came in the middle of what should have been an ordinary afternoon. He took a leave to grieve, to fly back and tie things up, to sit with the weight of losing the person who had stood beside him through most of his hardest years. Then he came back. Walked back through the doors, finished treatment, and started building something that looked, for a while, genuinely like a life.

Roah had met a woman while he was in treatment. When she completed, she moved in with him at a small place by the beach in Encinitas that my brother Kelly had set up for him, close enough to the water that on a clear morning you could hear the waves crashing before you opened your eyes. Roah worked here and there, at things that held his attention for a while before something else did. Work was never really Roah’s thing. What Roah was good at was living, the actual moment-to-moment business of being alive and finding joy in it. He was always trying to figure out how to live like a wealthy man without the horrible inconvenience of actually becoming one. He very nearly pulled it off. You couldn’t help but love him for trying.

After ignoring the last of the 911 texts, I finally got a message from a number I didn’t recognize. A neighbor. The text was short, the particular bluntness people reach for when they don’t know you and don’t want to soften what can’t be softened.

“Roah overdosed. He’s in the ambulance. It’s not good.”

That’s the thing. The text itself. You know the one. Every parent, every sibling, every spouse, every friend of an addict knows the one, the message they spend years hoping that it never comes but expect it every time the phone rings. The one that finally arrives on an ordinary Sunday while the morning is still warm and smells like grass.

I grabbed my wife. Asked my sister-in-law to take the kids. Texted Kelly. He said he wanted to come with me, that he’d meet me at the house. The drive home was tightly wound and frantic: both hands on the wheel, phone on speaker, trying to find out which hospital, trying to get someone who knew something on the line, trying very hard not to complete the thought that was already forming fully in the back of my mind.

A couple of blocks from home, I reached the treating physician. I heard him take a breath, that particular breath, and something in me recognized what was coming before the first word arrived. I had sat across from this moment before, on the other side of it, in treatment rooms and hospital waiting rooms and phone calls exactly like this one. I had delivered this news. I knew its shape. I interrupted him.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

A pause. The kind that answers the question before the words do.

“I’m sorry. He is.”

“Flashes of fear and guilt and pain crushed my chest, and the tears made it impossible to drive.”

My wife turned toward me. I will never forget the sound she made, somewhere between a scream and something more animal than that, a sound that kept repeating itself: No. No. No. He isn’t. As if repetition could renegotiate the finality of it.

I drove the last two blocks home doing something that wasn’t quite driving. Kelly was already parked on the street. I pulled up alongside him and watched his face in the moment he read mine, watched the whole architecture of him shift and brace. I rolled down the window. I told him as clearly as I could manage:

“Roah is dead.”

I watched my big brother, my hero, start to break. The groan that came out of him. The way his chest couldn’t seem to find a rhythm. He was trying to push out a noise, maybe to release the pressure but little came out. We both got out of our cars and stood in the middle of the street and held onto each other and sobbed. Two grown men on a Sunday afternoon in the suburbs, undone completely and not caring at all.

We drove from Corona to Encinitas. The freeway was the freeway: indifferent, ordinary, full of people who had no idea of the weight that was in our car. We cried. We got angry. We let the silence do what silence does when two people are carrying the same unbearable thing and there’s nowhere to stick it.

We went and saw Roah. He was lying there the way people lie there: present and absent at the same time. Nothing there but the body that seemed to have failed him while here on Earth so many times. Gone from it in every way was everything that mattered. I remember standing next to him and thinking, with complete clarity: This isn’t even him. Whatever made Roah Roah had already left. What remained was just the container. His skin was cold in a way that didn’t feel quite real. And I kept thinking about his smile, that enormous, toothy smile he deployed like a weapon, the one that made you feel, even when you were furious with him, that everything was going to be fine.

I started working the math in my head. The if-onlys. If I had called sooner. If I had drawn different boundaries. If I had made different choices at any of the dozens of decision points that had led to this room, this bed, this cold. After all, this is what I do for a living. Getting people out of exactly this. It was my job. And my baby brother was dead. I had failed him. I had failed my family.

On the drive home, Kelly and I called our parents. Twenty-some years earlier they had already mourned Roah once, had gathered themselves around the possibility of losing him and somehow made their peace with an ending that never came. They had put him to rest in their hearts while he was still fighting. And then he had lived. And now, after everything, here we were.

We FaceTimed. They answered the way they always answered: my parents, Mike and Lavern, side by side on the couch, the television casting its familiar light across the room. Kelly tried to ease into it. He’s always been the careful one, the one who looks for the gentler road in. But there is no gentle road to this. When Kelly said Roah had passed, my father, Big Mike (I’m Little Mike), one of the strongest men I have ever known, a man I have spent my entire life measuring myself against, dropped the phone. It clattered somewhere off screen. And we could hear them both, through the speaker, somewhere in that familiar room: No. No. No.

The week that followed Roah’s death was formless and brutal: days of unregulated sobbing, of anger that had nowhere honest to land, of guilt that kept finding new shapes to take. By the sixth or seventh day, I had turned the focus of my anger toward his girlfriend and his dealer. His girlfriend was barely holding herself together, so I let that one go. The dealer was a different story.

It wasn’t hard to track him down.

I was in the car with my wife when he picked up. I’ll be honest with you: part of me wanted to perform a little. To show her that the man she married still had something sharp in him, that grief hadn’t taken everything. I started going off the moment he answered, loud, direct, the full weight of the week behind every word. He went quiet. Just listened. And after about a minute, I realized the sound coming through the phone wasn’t silence. He was crying.

His English was accented but clear. He told me he was sorry. That he’d known, when the phone rang with my number, that I was coming to kill him, his words, not mine, and that he didn’t blame me for wanting to. Then he started talking about Roah. Not about business, not about any of that, about Roah. About who he was. About how much he had loved him. He told me he was from Mexico, that there was no family here, that it was just him and his girlfriend, and that she was pregnant.

I felt the anger leaving me and I hated it. I had needed that anger. It was the only thing keeping the grief from being the only thing. I wanted to stay in it. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted his family to feel what my family was feeling. I wanted them to carry some portion of this weight. But the man on the other end of the phone was already carrying it. You could hear it.

By the time we hung up, I had offered him a scholarship to go to treatment. He accepted. He went. I don’t know what became of him after, whether it held, whether it didn’t, whether that baby was born into something better or something harder. But I know what happened to me in that car. The rage subsided. The need to assign blame began its slow migration toward something quieter and more honest.

“Roah overdosed. Not me. Not his dealer. It was on Roah.”

That’s the hardest sentence I’ve ever had to sit with. Not because it’s cruel, it isn’t meant to be, but because it’s true. And in this work, the truth is the only thing that has ever actually helped anyone move forward. The blame I was carrying wasn’t protecting Roah. It was just protecting me from having to say it.

Kelly and I were already close before this. After, we became something else, the particular closeness of people who have stood in the street together and come apart and then kept going. I watched the loss soften something in him. Watched it make more room in him for the kinds of pain he’d always known I was carrying but hadn’t always known how to hold.

I write this not because I want anything from you. Not sympathy, not understanding, not the particular kindness that people extend to the grieving. I write it because I needed to. Because Roah deserves to be written about. Because the way he lived, with that enormous, unearned confidence, that irrational joy, that refusal to accept anyone else’s terms, is worth putting down somewhere permanent.

It has taken some time, but I have come to peace with Roah’s death. I’ve also found my way back to my passion and motivation for this work. Were there things I could have done differently? Of course. But Roah was accountable for his own decisions, and that truth, as hard as it is, is part of how I carry him now.

“No family should have to go through this, and yet far too many will.”

Addiction does not negotiate. It has no interest in how funny you are, how hard you fought, how many times you came back from somewhere impossible. It does not care that you were the kid who stood in the backyard in the catcher’s gear and told your brothers to throw harder.

I will miss my baby brother for the rest of my life. Not the idea of him. Not some polished memory that grief has cleaned up and made safe. The real one; He was difficult as heck, radiant, and now he is gone.

Mike O’Reilly

Founder & Editor-in-Chief · The Art of Recovery

mike@theartofrecoverymag.com

Mike O’Reilly has spent more than twenty years in addiction treatment, not as an outsider studying recovery from a safe distance, but as someone who survived the very systems he later helped rebuild.

After living through addiction, homelessness, incarceration, family separation, and the punitive machinery that often strips people of their humanity, Mike entered the field with a different vision: recovery should restore dignity, not erase it. Since 2004, he has served as a founder, owner, director, programmer, advocate, and facility builder, helping create and revive treatment environments where clients are seen as human beings rather than bodies in beds.

Mike is known for standing with those most often dismissed as too difficult, too damaged, or too far gone. His work has helped countless clients recover their voice, value, and sense of self, and many have gone on to serve others in the field. As Editor of The Art of Recovery, Mike seeks one thing: for his voice, the contributors’, and the readers’ to build a global community that welcomes as many voices as are willing and able to join him, a nuanced, creative conversation that surpasses the barriers of words, race, age, religion, and social status, as Art does. Welcome to the beginning…

Mike is the proud husband of Amy and Dad to Sydney, McKay, Porter, Matti, Ava, Harper, Charlie and Pressly.

When I was a teenager, I used to read the dictionary for fun. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. Well except for my peers, teachers, and well, who am I kidding… it was a total motive, but I learned very fast that I loved words. They felt like keys. They felt like songs.

Since I had my “agendas” I naturally needed to be able to recall my favorite word just in case anyone asked me. I chose a lesser used, and even lesser known word: acquiescence. Yes! That’s it, and she won the title. It sounded elegant, a little French, vaguely intellectual. I probably bragged about it because I thought it made me look well-read.

Nobody around me talked like that, especially words from the French existential philosopher, Camus… not one person ever asked me to tell them my favorite word and I probably put more people off than not, other than my English Teacher, Mrs. S., as I found myself creating situations to use it.

Most of the time people gave me this look like “you are an idiot; say it in English” or “what the hell is she saying and why!?” I still didn’t realize then that it wasn’t a flex. Which is pretty funny.

Fast forward. I’m in the car decades later, leaving the home of my gurus feeling all energetic and s**t, listening to an audiobook on archetypes. I’m excited, expecting to resonate with something inspiring. The maiden. The mystic. The wounded healer. Something romantic. Something that’s got the “rock star” imprint and destiny. And then the Prostitute Archetype comes through the speakers. My heart drops.

Saying it resonated is an understatement. It was a forensic report of my entire personality. Every sentence was a mirror I couldn’t look away from. Every example was an exhibit in a case against me. Every word described every act of my life. I wanted to turn it off.

I could have pushed a button, but I couldn’t. I didn’t need more information supporting that I was a sell out. I needed resuscitation. I needed to know how the hell to make appeals that it wasn’t the case. No such luck. Then I shut her voice up, with the push of a button.

But I couldn’t unhear it. And I couldn’t unsee the montage of moments where I had bargained away sacred parts of myself, parts I knew were special, parts I loved, and used them like currency.

And not for anything worthy. Not for a better life. For the bare minimum. I didn’t trade my soul for mansions or diamonds. I traded it for 7-Eleven burritos, cheap beer, and a haunted rental with a leaky roof, over and over and over, until there was nearly nothing left.

Nothing left to bargain with. Nothing left to live for, certainly not for dignity’s sake. Nothing left to support myself or my children with. That flood of realization landed like the cosmos threw a flask of acid that smacked me between my heart and my throat, and splashed up on my mouth and chin, melting my lips and skin off.

It dissolved the mask I had worn for decades, revealing the hollow chest cavity and the shattered voice box beneath it. No truth. No heartbeat. No pretty face left to hide behind. Just the teeth of something soulless I never meant to become.

Beneath the acid, beneath the self-disgust, something twitched, a twang of sadness. Wait, something else too: the grittiness of resolve. A flinch of life.

“No more.”

Not whispered. Not pleaded. Not questioned. It wasn’t a prayer. It was a verdict. And life tested me instantly. As it would continue to.

I pulled over to get gas. And a coffee. I was in full-out emotional pity party of shame and contempt for my newfound brain worm: “you’re a prostitute, you’re a prostitute, lah lah lah lahhhh.” I didn’t perform. I didn’t smile. I didn’t ask anyone about their dog, I didn’t even look for change for the homeless dude 20 feet from me; I didn’t even ask the cashier how her day was.

“Did you really think it was your job to babysit strangers’ emotions? Hahahaha,” scoffed my ego, who was pretty delighted with this unexpected awareness.

I bought gas. And noticed the tire light on, even the car was giving me yellow exclamation points to keep me from burying this news. I put air in the tire and paid more than I expected. I was letting it out instead of putting it in. Story of my life, I thought.

I heard the sliding doors of the convenience store open, and footsteps behind me. I thought I was in the clear and could sulk openly. “S**t, pull it together.”

“Hey, here’s the air code. I think it’s so stupid they make people pay for air,” said a soft voice.

I turned around as the cashier handed me a sticky note with a four-digit pin. I felt horrible for being “rude.” Something inside remembered: I’m a nice person. I’m supposed to show kindness. I said, “Thank you so much!”

“Yeah, nice and boundary-less,” the old voice hissed. You’re so nice you’re a prostitute. Are you gonna give this lady your soul for the code to the air now, just to show you were really thankful?

She went back in. I sat with some shame, because she didn’t want anything from me. I should have been relieved. The doors opened again.

“Ahhh, here it comes,” was my first thought.

She came out holding a tiny silver elephant figurine, imperfect and covered in sticker gems for eyes. I was confused. She handed it to me. She told me she painted animal figurines, and that I looked sad, so she brought this one she was working on out to cheer me up.

I held the figurine, and I loved it. She said, “Oh wait, it’s not done.” She painted sparkly nail polish onto one of its eyes, slowly and with effort. “I have cerebral palsy, and painting these helps me,” she explained.

Something under my ribs softened.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Red,” she said, pointing to her burgundy-red dyed hair.

“Red, you’re my kind of gal,” I told her. “I needed your kindness tonight.”

As I walked back to my car, I tilted the little elephant and the sparkles flashed red in the gas station lights. For the first time in a very long time, I smiled inside. The tire warning light was off. And I drove home.

Xia (Zē-ah)

Writer · The Art of Recovery · Issue 01

Xia, pronounced Zē-ah, is a writer and wayfinder whose name carries meanings of rosy clouds, summer, and heroic honor. Her work moves through memoir, mysticism, grief, faith, humor, and transformation, tracing the strange and sacred path back to the self. Guided by symbols, love, and hard-won truth, Xia writes as both witness and fellow traveler for anyone becoming whole in the aftermath of their own undoing.

comments@theartofrecoverymag.com

When you love someone with an addiction, so much of your attention can become focused on them. Are they okay? Are they safe? Are they telling the truth? Are they getting worse? Will they finally get help? Is there something more you should be doing? The questions can feel endless, and the emotional weight of carrying them can become enormous.

You may find yourself watching, waiting, worrying, researching, helping, forgiving, hoping, and holding everything together as best you can. You may be sleeping poorly, keeping secrets, canceling plans, or going through your days with a brave face while quietly falling apart inside. It can be incredibly lonely, because unless someone has lived through it, they may not fully understand what it is like to love someone and feel powerless to protect them from a struggle that is affecting everyone around them.

I understand this kind of love. I understand the confusion, the hope, the worry, and the exhaustion. In my own life, I became completely focused on trying to help someone I loved. I was compassionate. I was concerned. I believed that perhaps, if I tried hard enough or loved deeply enough, I could somehow make things better. But over time, my own well-being began to disappear beneath the weight of what I was carrying. My life became centered on someone else’s struggle, and I was losing myself in the process.

Eventually, a sentence rose up inside me that I could no longer ignore: Saving you is killing me.

That sentence was not about blame. It was not about giving up on someone I loved. It was the moment I finally acknowledged how much pain I was in and how desperately I needed support too. It was the moment I realized that loving another person should not require me to abandon myself.

When Love Becomes Survival Mode

Loving someone with an addiction is hard. It can create a constant state of uncertainty and emotional alarm. You may feel as though your nervous system is always bracing for the next phone call, the next crisis, the next disappointment, or the next promise that you want so badly to believe. Even during quiet moments, your mind may still be racing, trying to predict what is coming or figure out how to prevent something painful from happening.

When your focus is repeatedly pulled toward another person’s needs, choices, safety, and struggles, it is easy for your own needs to fade into the background. You may begin telling yourself that you will take care of yourself later, once things calm down, once they get help, once the crisis passes, once life feels stable again.

But sometimes life does not calm down on its own. Sometimes the person who needs your care and attention most urgently is the person you have been neglecting: yourself.

In Saving You Is Killing Me: Loving Someone with an Addiction, I write that the book is devoted to the loved one because when addiction has been put first, you may have been coming in second. That is not a judgment. It is not criticism of your love, loyalty, or compassion. It is simply an invitation to notice whether you have been giving so much of yourself away that there is no longer enough left to sustain your own health, peace, or happiness.

You are allowed to acknowledge that this has hurt you. You are allowed to say that you are tired. You are allowed to need care, comfort, guidance, healing, and support. None of that makes you uncaring. It makes you human.

Three Truths That Can Begin to Set You Free

In support communities for families and loved ones affected by addiction, there are three powerful truths that many people eventually encounter:

You did not cause it. You cannot control it. You cannot cure it.

At first, these words may feel painful. When you love someone, accepting that you cannot control or cure what is happening can feel like being asked to stop hoping. It can feel like surrendering your love or turning your back on someone who matters deeply to you.

But these truths are not meant to take away your love. They are meant to take away the crushing weight of believing that another person’s recovery rests entirely on your shoulders.

You did not cause someone else’s addiction. Loved ones often search through the past looking for a reason or a moment they could have changed. A parent may wonder what they did wrong. A partner may question whether they were enough. A child, sibling, or friend may carry guilt for not noticing sooner or not being able to help more. Yet another person’s addiction is not evidence of your failure. You do not need to live under the burden of blame.

You cannot control someone else’s addiction. You may speak honestly. You may offer appropriate support. You may make decisions that protect your home, finances, safety, and mental health. You may love deeply and continue to hope. But you cannot control the choices of another human being, no matter how much you wish you could.

You cannot cure someone else’s addiction. Love is powerful. Compassion matters. Support matters. But love is not treatment, and sacrificing yourself cannot cure someone else. You are not failing because your love has not fixed what is hurting them.

In my book, I express this truth in a way that changed my own life:

“You are powerless over their addiction, but powerful over yourself.”

This is where hope begins to shift. Instead of asking only, What more can I do to save them? You can also begin asking, What can I do to take care of myself?

What You Can Do

When someone you love has an addiction, it may feel as though every important decision belongs to someone else. Will they get help? Will they stay well? Will they keep their commitments? Will they change? Living with so many unknowns can make you feel powerless.

But you are not powerless in your own life.

You can tell the truth about how you are doing. You can stop pretending that everything is fine when you feel overwhelmed, frightened, exhausted, or heartbroken. You can choose one trusted person and say, “This has been really hard for me, and I need support.”

You can seek counseling, coaching, a family support group, spiritual support, or community with others who understand what it means to love someone with an addiction. Pain often grows heavier in isolation. Support gives you somewhere safe to place some of what you have been carrying alone.

You can begin paying attention to your own body and mind. Are you sleeping? Eating well? Moving? Breathing deeply? Seeing people who make you feel supported? Engaging with parts of your life that remind you of who you are beyond this struggle? These things may feel small compared to the situation you are facing, but they matter. Your well-being is not an extra. It is essential.

You can also set boundaries. Boundaries are not punishments, threats, or evidence that you do not care. Boundaries are a way of identifying what you need in order to remain safe, emotionally well, and aligned with your values. They are one of the ways you begin giving yourself back the care and dignity you have so freely extended to someone else.

Taking Care of Yourself Is Not Giving Up on Them

One of the hardest parts of putting yourself first is the guilt. You may fear that stepping back from constant worry, problem-solving, or rescuing means that you are no longer loving enough. You may feel that if someone else is struggling, you do not have the right to feel peaceful, joyful, or well.

But taking care of yourself is not giving up on them. It means you are no longer giving up on yourself.

In my own life, I reached a turning point when I realized I could not continue living in a state of emotional depletion. I needed to heal. I needed to restore my own peace and well-being. I needed to redirect some of the care I had been pouring outward and begin offering it to myself.

There was a moment that became symbolic in my healing. The garage windows in my home had been covered with black paint, blocking out the light. One day, I began scraping it away. Little by little, the sunlight came back in. It was a physical act, but it represented something much deeper. I could not control another person’s path, but I could begin allowing light back into my own life.

That is what choosing yourself can look like. It does not require one huge, dramatic decision. It often begins with small moments of truth and care. Calling someone. Getting rest. Saying no. Attending a support meeting. Booking an appointment. Going for a walk. Writing in a journal. Letting yourself laugh again. Returning to something that reminds you who you are.

The Me First Challenge

For this first column, I would love to invite you into a gentle seven-day practice called the Me First Challenge.

Each morning, before your mind automatically moves toward worrying about the person you love, pause and ask yourself one question:

What do I need today to take care of my own well-being?

Perhaps you need rest. Perhaps you need to speak honestly with someone. Perhaps you need support. Perhaps you need fresh air, nourishing food, a quiet hour, a boundary, a moment of prayer, a therapy appointment, or simply permission not to solve everything today.

Write your answer down, and then choose one small action that honors that need.

This is not an exercise in selfishness. It is an exercise in returning to yourself. It is a reminder that your needs are real, your feelings matter, and your health is worthy of protection.

You Are Worth Saving Too

When you love someone with an addiction, it is natural to hope for their healing. It is natural to care deeply and to wish you could make their path easier. But your life cannot be placed on permanent hold while you wait for someone else’s choices to change.

Your pain matters. Your peace matters. Your health matters. Your future matters.

You did not cause it. You cannot control it. You cannot cure it. But you can choose to care for yourself through it. You can choose support. You can choose healing. You can choose boundaries, compassion, courage, and community. You can begin building yourself back up, one day and one choice at a time.

I know how difficult this is. I also know what becomes possible when you finally turn some of that beautiful love back toward yourself.

You are not alone. You are worthy of healing. And you are worth saving too.

Andrea Seydel holds a degree in Psychology and a Master’s in Happiness Studies. She is a Positive Psychology Educator, Professional Certified Coach, founder of Live Life Happy, and author of the Saving You Is Killing Me: Loving Someone with an Addiction book series and Recovery Without Rock Bottom: Reclaim Your Life from Addictive Behaviors.

Because loving someone with an addiction should not mean losing yourself in the process.

Andrea Seydel

Positive Psychology Educator · MA in Happiness Studies

Andrea Seydel holds a degree in Psychology and a Master’s in Happiness Studies. She is a Positive Psychology Educator, Professional Certified Coach, founder of Live Life Happy, and author of the Saving You Is Killing Me series and Recovery Without Rock Bottom. More at savingyouiskillingme.com.

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Also by Andrea Seydel

References: Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-Compassion. William Morrow. · Seydel, A. (2023). Saving You Is Killing Me (2nd rev. ed.). Live Life Happy Publishing.

The Simplest Solution

In this short article I hope to suggest some ideas that may prove helpful to those striving for sobriety and to suggest a somewhat novel approach to therapeutic discussions whether in group or individual settings. I have found the ideas have utility for therapists in their attempts to help their clients, and also for individuals who are working for sobriety to look at their recovery attempts in a little different way.

These ideas come from 35 years as a therapist in residential settings as well as day treatment, intensive outpatient, and general outpatient settings. In each of these situations, I have learned from my clients who have often been through multiple treatment opportunities in what some have called a “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle of treatment. They have been some of my greatest teachers! I am grateful for them! I honor their courage and their strength!

A 14th-century English friar, by the name of William of Ockham, posited something known as Occam’s razor. It is sometimes called by other names such as the Principle of Parsimony. The original Latin is interpreted as, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity,” or “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

More modern ways of understanding it suggest that “All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.” In science, it is said “Assume the simplest natural cause.” Another interpretation is known as the Principle of Parsimony or rule of simplicity.

In medicine, it is called the “Zebra” and posits that “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not Zebras.” I’m going to bend that just a tiny bit and just say, “The simplest solution is often the most useful.”

“The simplest solution is often the most useful.”

Furthermore, I’m going to assert that substance use treatment is too complex and way too theoretical to be of much practical use to most substance use disorder sufferers. I think we get overly theoretical and academic in our approaches and those approaches then lack utility for the very people we are trying to help.

We may become frustrated, and think we aren’t of much use to our clients. They, in turn, become frustrated and feel inept as they are unable to remember and utilize the skills and tools we tried to teach them in treatment. We need a model that is simple, memorable and that’s applicable across the broad spectrum of clients that find themselves ensnared in addiction.

Most of us have been indoctrinated throughout our lives with what we should do, ought to do, are supposed to do, need to do, got to do, etc. We are taught, sometimes severely, about what our duty is, what our responsibility is or what the law is.

But how many people ever asked us, simply and sincerely, “What do you want?” More importantly, do we ever really ask, “What do I want?” I think it may be the most important question we can ask and get the answer to.

In my experiences working in Residential Treatment, Day Treatment, Sober Living, Intensive Outpatient or General Outpatient, I’ve observed something that is almost always the case. When I ask a client about what they want, I get one of two typical responses. They say, “I want to be happy.” Wonderful. What does that mean?

If I press a little bit, I’ll get something like, “I want to feel good.” Well, maybe that explains the lapses and relapses! The easiest and quickest way to change how you’re feeling is to ingest some mood- or mind-altering substance.

Still, if I push a little more, I may hear the person saying what they’re supposed to want, or perhaps, what they want to want or are told they want. But it’s not really what they want. Most of the time, they give up by saying, “I don’t know!” Okay. Now we have a point of departure for some exploration and genuine searching.

It seems most folks, addicts in particular, really have no clue what they want! In the 1854 book, Walden, author Henry David Thoreau stated, “The masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” There are probably hundreds of possible contributing factors, but I will assert that a primary factor is not knowing what we want!

In an age of social media, people compare themselves to others and allow the idealized images of beauty and success portrayed therein to tell them what they want and influence them to believe it. When they don’t compare favorably, they may descend into depression, anxiety and other disorders characteristic of a “life of desperation.” Certainly not what “happiness” consists of!

When I’ve discussed this notion with some people, they counter that we can’t always have what we want. I suppose that’s true if you don’t know what you want! But then, how would you know whether you were getting it or not? Furthermore, I think we can always get what we want if we’re clear on it. If we’re willing to look a little deeper, it’s there.

For example, I don’t know anyone that likes paying for gasoline these days. I grew up when gas was 19¢ per gallon. Compared to then, the current cost seems almost surreal. I have to confess, along with everyone I know, that I do not want to pay the current price for gasoline.

However, I really, really want to drive my vehicle! So, I would argue that I am doing what I want when I pay for gas because of my desire to drive my vehicle.

I’m not saying that you don’t have to work for or pay something for what you want. But I am saying that when you know what you want the cost it exacts is less onerous. When you perceive that you are progressing toward what you want, the reward outweighs the toll.

Accordingly, may I suggest a simple exercise that seems to have great usefulness when taken seriously. Write down on a piece of paper, on your phone, tablet, computer or other piece of electronic wizardry, the answers (plural) to the question, “What do I want?” The answers can be anything you want.

They might include a bunch of money, the vehicle of your dreams, an attractive partner, nice house or plot of land, a recreational vehicle, travel (say where) or anything else you want. Add to the list as you think of things. It’s important to find and write the words as the answers become more real and less of an idle wish. Be quite specific. Don’t hold back!

Once you feel you have a good list of things you want, ask a second question. “What do I really want?” Now, this is a different question. This requires more of an emotional response. This may help you see why the answers to the first question are important to you.

For example, on my first list, I may have written that I want to earn $100K / year salary. On the second list I may write that I want to be free to spend time with my family. A job or career with a good salary will allow that freedom.

You may have written that you want to own a home on the first list. On the second you may have recorded that you want yourself and your family to feel safe and secure. You will likely see that your second question replies are fewer in number than the first.

Now that you have some clear responses to those two questions, you have a third to answer. Here it is: More than anything and everything what do I really, really, really want? This is an existential or even spiritual question. This should get you to think of life purposes.

What do you want to be remembered for when you’re gone? If you get the opportunity to contemplate your own demise, what do you want to know your life was all about. You may see only a few or even a single response to this question.

The point needs to be emphasized that these answers need to represent what you truly want, rather than what you’ve been taught you are supposed to want. Be honest! Dig deep and be serious about it. There are no right or wrong answers as long as you’re truthful.

The Zen Buddhists have a relevant saying. They say, “Beware of what you want… for you will get it!” I put an English twist on it and say, “Be aware of what you want and go get it!”

The Psychologist, Author and Spiritual leader Wayne Dyer claimed that the adage, “Seeing is believing” is backwards. He taught that, “Believing is seeing!” and that when we are clear about what we want and looking for those things, it is almost inevitable that they will come to us. It’s not magic; it’s clarity and vision.

“Be aware of what you want, and go get it.”

I sincerely invite you to give this simple exercise an honest try. It is straightforward, but if you do it well, you will be surprised by how difficult it is and how much thought and effort are required! Ask yourself the questions throughout the days and weeks.

Remember these are about what you want. They are not about what you don’t want. For example, rather than saying, “I don’t want to use substances,” say something like, “I want to be clear minded and in touch with my life.”

As you begin to achieve what you want in small or big ways, you will find things coming to you more readily. The reinforcement of getting the rewards of what you want will empower you to continue! As you ask and answer the questions as an ongoing practice you may find your answers will change. You will add things to the lists and may remove some things that are no longer what you want.

Dare to dream! Write it down so it’s real! I believe you will be glad you did!

Davee Chandler

Therapist · 35 Years in Recovery Treatment

Davee Chandler has spent more than 35 years as a therapist across residential, day treatment, intensive outpatient, and general outpatient settings. He credits his clients, many who moved through multiple rounds of treatment, as his greatest teachers.

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I was 34 years old and sleeved from neck to toe with the soot from blue magic (prison ink). After 4 years in juvenile prisons and 14 more in various prison yards around the country, I was certainly convinced of 2 things:

First, I was wildly addicted to anything that kept me from having to sort out the mental anguish of my childhood, and secondly, I was a lifer on the installment plan, only, of course, until I finally committed a heinous enough crime to take the word installment out of that equation.

I managed to cram an enormous amount of destruction into those brief periods of “freedom”. Paradoxically, I was always a mental slave when thrust into the doldrums of society and, more often than not, lucid while living a life inside of the belly of the beast.

Mainstream therapists had me all figured out. OCD. BIPOLAR disorder. ADHD. Anti-Social Personality Disorder. BLAH. BLAH. BLAH. The worst part about all of their psycho-babble, was that I didn’t really know who the hell I was, so if they defined it well, I wore them like the filthy jackets they were.

“I wore them like the filthy jackets they were.”

I would live up to it all. Unchecked anger and violent outbursts ruled the day….

My drug addiction continually progressed. I was injecting cocktails that would kill the average joe addict. What did I care? I was a lifer in the prison system. Might as well embrace my role. There was no redemption for me………..The voices echoed down the empty hallway of my mind. “you will never change”. “You are f*****g crazy Joker” My family knew I was the next one to die……

2011, I was on my 7th stint inside of those walls. It was coming up on “lights out”, and from the top adjacent bunk I had been eyeballing this youngster who had been neatly making a razor knife with some underwear string and a few other crude materials. Having been around a few blocks to this point, I was keenly aware of my surroundings in the joint.

He was either going to slice someone up or try to kill himself; I was leaning towards the latter in my mind, based on his demeanor. Well, S**t, I wasn’t going to let that happen. He was too young. Too confused. Feeling trapped. How often had I felt that as a youngster going through the State’s system. Sure enough, this young man headed straight for the community bathrooms. DANG IT. This was trouble. I jumped down to follow him quickly. By the time I had gotten there he was deep into a cut along his jugular. I slapped the knife out of his hand, took him down to the ground after he made an attempt on my life and pressed a towel hard onto his wound. Screaming for help I managed to get the attention of the guards. Sigh……

This was all my first reaction. No thought. Just into action.

A very peculiar thing happened over the next few months. I lost my clout. I was made fun of. I was talked down to and ostracized from the “homies”. I was asked why I would do such a thing. “Why didn’t you let him die” or “that little p***y was being raped by the Tongans, just a little prison b***h” etc…

WTF. I DIDN’T fit in, in prison. I wasn’t a lifer after all. I had a soul. I wasn’t like some of these other guys.

NOW WHAT? Genuine effort. Fervent prayer to be able to break free from the chains of addiction. Constant failure moving forward. Small successes. More failures.

NEVER GIVE UP. 14 years later. I am 48 years old. I have a beautiful family, a great career, solid law, abiding friends and a wonderful support group. I am drug free and genuinely happy. Sure, I have constant challenges and the road is bumpy at times……SUCH are the DOLDRUMS of life. A life that I want to live now. What we believe about ourselves is of the utmost importance, and if you have made agreements with yourself that are not true, identify them, know your worth and

Shawn Nelson

Letters from the Yard

“I’ve been blessed and honored to have drug addiction be a major force in my life. The battles fought, the lessons learned, and the continuing struggle to find and embrace freedom keep me heavily introspective and feeling alive.”

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After more than twenty-five years in this industry, I’ve lost count of how many treatment centers I’ve walked through. Beautiful buildings, impressive programs, clinical teams with résumés a mile long; I’ve seen plenty of all of it. But every now and then you walk into a place and feel something before a single word is spoken. That is exactly what happened to me at California Behavioral Health.

I was invited out to tour CBH during the West Coast Symposium, and I’ll be honest; I didn’t know quite what to expect. From the moment I reached the door, though, they had me. Someone greeted me right there at the entrance with a big smile and a little gift bag, and tucked inside was a generous piece of salt water taffy.

Now, if you know me, you know that’s about the fastest way there is to win me over. Want to make me happy? Give me candy. It was a small thing, but it told me everything about how this place treats the people who come through its doors.

Nestled into the quiet desert landscape of Cathedral City, CBH has everything you would hope to find in a healing environment: peaceful surroundings, private individual rooms, beautiful outdoor space, a pool that looks out over the mountains, equine therapy, and room for people to finally exhale.

I loved the setup. The individual rooms in particular stood out to me; there’s a real dignity in giving someone their own space when they’re at one of the hardest points of their life. But as much as I admired the property, that isn’t what stayed with me on the drive home. What stayed with me was the people.

“As much as I admired the property, what stayed with me was the people.”

The staff were absolutely wonderful: big smiles, genuinely kind, warm, and outgoing. I spent a good part of my visit just talking with them, and I enjoyed every one of those conversations. You can tell very quickly when people actually love what they do, and this team clearly does. The clients I met were the same way: open, friendly, completely at ease. There was laughter moving back and forth between staff and clients that you simply cannot fake or manufacture.

After spending time with Melissa Legere, co-founder, co-owner, Clinical Director, and COO of CBH, I understood exactly why the place feels the way it does. This is her vision brought to life.

Melissa didn’t set out to build a treatment center. She got into this work because she genuinely cared about people. After earning her master’s in counseling from California State University, Fullerton, she stepped into her first role at a 12-step-based treatment center. She’ll tell you she was still learning the world of recovery back then, but one truth landed with her right away: healing happens through connection.

Before the clinical plans, before the assignments, before any of it, people need to feel safe. They need someone to listen, and they need someone who believes they are more than the worst chapter of their story. Melissa had that gift. Within two years she was a Clinical Director, and eventually she was overseeing roughly 250 beds across Southern California as a Divisional Clinical Director.

From the outside it looked like success. But from the inside, she kept noticing what was missing. She saw people struggling with addiction and mental health being sorted into separate boxes, when in reality their pain was so often tangled together. She saw clients who needed compassion being met with punishment, and people who were afraid to be honest because honesty sometimes came with consequences.

So she started imagining something different, a place built on connection rather than control, where recovery could look different for different people, where someone could explore 12-step, SMART Recovery, CODA, NAMI, therapy, and community until they found what actually worked for them. A place where people could finally tell the truth. That place became California Behavioral Health.

One of the things that struck me most during my visit was just how involved the team is. The therapists here aren’t faces clients see only at appointment time; they are part of their lives. They sit with them, eat with them, laugh with them, and go on outings with them. They know their families, their fears, their dreams, and the person each client is working to become. A lot of the staff have been there since the very beginning, and that tells you everything you need to know about the culture Melissa has built.

“You can’t teach people to care like that. You create an environment where that kind of care is possible.”

And then there’s Jessica. Jessica Morley was a flight attendant, a career she loved and was proud of. But behind the smile she gave the world, she was quietly disappearing. Alcohol, marijuana, and eventually Adderall had taken over; what started as a prescription became something she felt she could no longer function without.

She describes it as losing herself, her personality, her joy, her identity. At 36, Jessica lost the job she loved after testing positive for substances. It was the moment she could no longer pretend everything was okay. Her airline gave her one chance: get help. That chance brought her to California Behavioral Health.

When she arrived she was exhausted in every sense: physically, emotionally, and mentally. Years of running on substances and sleeping only a few hours a night had finally caught up with her, and for the first several days she mostly slept while her body began to heal. Then, slowly, something beautiful started to happen.

She came out of her room. She started talking. She started laughing. She started making friends. She started creating art again. Piece by piece, the person she thought she had lost began to come back. Through therapy at CBH she discovered things about herself she’d never understood before, and she began addressing not just the substance use but the deeper struggles underneath it. She found connection, joy, and hope.

Today Jessica is helping others, building real friendships, giving back through service, and preparing to return to the career she once thought she’d lost forever. Her story isn’t only about getting clean. It’s about coming home to herself.

One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter in addiction treatment is the belief that recovery is simply a matter of wanting it badly enough. If that were true, most of the people I’ve worked with over the last decade would have gotten sober long before they ever walked through the doors of a treatment program.

The truth is that recovery requires more than motivation. It requires skills.

I learned this lesson long before I entered the recovery field.

With ADHD, completing even simple tasks could be surprisingly difficult. I can recall countless times as a teenager having a manager explain what needed to be completed during the day. He would talk while I nodded along with all the enthusiasm of a boxer listening to his coach before a big fight. I’d throw in a few “yeses” and “I see’s” to let him know I was tracking.

Then the conversation would end, and I would wander off in the general direction of my assignment with absolutely no idea what had just been said.

Before long, the manager would find me in the back of the store putting random items into a box and ask, “What are you doing?”

Without missing a beat, I would confidently reply, “What you asked me to do.”

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t care. It wasn’t laziness. It wasn’t a lack of effort. The problem was that I didn’t yet have the coping skills necessary to work around the challenges that came with ADHD. I hadn’t learned to write things down, ask clarifying questions, repeat instructions back, or break tasks into smaller steps.

Recovery requires more than motivation. It requires skills.

Over the years, both in my own recovery and in my work helping others, I’ve seen the same principle play out with addiction.

Most people who enter treatment genuinely want their lives to change. They want to repair relationships, regain their health, keep their jobs, and stop living in a cycle of guilt and regret. Yet wanting those things doesn’t automatically provide the tools necessary to achieve them.

When stress hits, when a relationship falls apart, when loneliness creeps in, when anxiety becomes overwhelming, or when life simply becomes uncomfortable, many people find themselves reaching for the one coping mechanism they know best: substances.

This is why coping skills are so important. They are the bridge between the desire to stay sober and the ability to stay sober.

I’ve watched people transform their lives when they learn simple but powerful skills: calling someone before a craving becomes overwhelming, learning how to sit with uncomfortable emotions, exercising instead of isolating, journaling instead of suppressing feelings, practicing mindfulness, attending meetings, or simply learning how to ask for help.

None of these skills remove life’s problems. What they do is give us a healthier way to respond to them.

The longer I work in this field, the more convinced I become that successful recovery is often less about willpower and more about preparation. People don’t just need the desire to change. They need practical tools they can reach for when life inevitably becomes difficult.

Just as my ADHD didn’t improve because I wanted to pay attention harder, addiction doesn’t disappear because someone wants sobriety badly enough.

Real recovery happens when we build a toolbox full of healthy coping skills and learn to use them consistently.

Josh Kendrick

The Recovery Toolbox

I’ve spent over 20 years working in recovery spaces, supporting individuals through substance use treatment, housing instability, and long-term rebuilding efforts. My work has taken me through treatment centers, recovery programs, and community-based support services, where I’ve consistently focused on one thing: helping people stay engaged in the process of change, even when it feels out of reach.

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My perspective is also personal. I have lived experience with addiction and long-term recovery, which informs how I show up in this work. It’s given me a grounded understanding of how non-linear recovery can be, and how essential honesty, dignity, and consistency are in the process.

I’m known for being direct, empathetic, and motivational in my approach, with a strong belief that humor and human connection are often what keep people going when things get difficult.

Through my writing, I aim to highlight the realities of recovery without oversimplifying them. I want to honor the resilience, complexity, and capacity for change that exist in every person’s story.

If you’ve ever found yourself reaching for a drink to quiet the noise in your head, or losing yourself in a behavior just to feel a few hours of relief, you are not broken, and you are far from alone.

Many of us carry pain we can’t fully name: the residue of old wounds, the grief we never let ourselves feel, the low hum of a fear that has no obvious source. For some, that invisible weight eventually becomes unbearable. And so we search, desperately and reasonably, for something to soften it.

That search, not weakness, not moral failure, is often where addiction begins.

Addiction is widely misread as the pursuit of pleasure, a chase for the next high. But the clinical reality, and the lived reality, tells a different story. At its core, addiction is most often a response to emotional pain: a makeshift solution to an internal emergency that never got proper attention.

Unresolved trauma doesn’t simply sit dormant. It reroutes. It shows up as the anxiety that lives just beneath your skin, the sadness that descends without warning, the numbness that settles in where joy used to be.

Trauma rewires the nervous system, making the world feel inherently unsafe and the self feel perpetually at risk. When that alarm doesn’t switch off, the mind will look, rationally, even brilliantly, for any available way to turn down the volume.

This is the landscape in which self-medication takes root. Alcohol quiets the fear. Opioids dissolve the grief. Compulsive behaviors, overeating, sex, gambling, relentless overworking, create just enough distraction to make the ache inside feel manageable. These are not signs of weakness or poor character. They are survival strategies, forged under pressure, that say clearly: I cannot hold this alone.

And for a time, they work. The body relaxes. The mind stills. The pain recedes to a tolerable distance. The problem is what happens next. As the effects wear off, the original pain returns, compounded now by shame, guilt, and the growing fear of what you are becoming. The brain, always learning, draws a straightforward conclusion: the only reliable relief comes from the substance or behavior. And so the cycle tightens.

Emotional numbing is both the means and the end of self-medication. The nervous system, overwhelmed for too long, begins to mute sensation broadly, not just the bad feelings, but all of them. The capacity for joy, intimacy, and genuine connection quietly dims alongside the pain. The very resources that might enable healing, a tender moment with someone who loves you, the pleasure of an ordinary evening, the impulse toward help, become harder to access.

This is why addiction is so rarely about wanting to feel euphoric. It is almost always about wanting, desperately, to stop feeling destroyed. The substance or behavior becomes emotional armor, a shield that does protect us from the full weight of the past, while quietly extracting everything else in the present.

Research increasingly confirms what therapists and survivors have long understood: trauma and addiction are not separate problems. They are two expressions of the same injury. Studies show that between 25 and 75 percent of people who have experienced traumatic events report problematic substance use. Adverse childhood experiences, abuse, neglect, household instability, dramatically raise the statistical likelihood of addiction in adulthood, not because of genetic destiny, but because unprocessed pain seeks an outlet.

Childhood trauma is particularly formative because it strikes when the brain is still constructing its model of the world. A child who learns that emotions are dangerous, that vulnerability invites harm, or that comfort is unreliable will carry those lessons into adulthood as the operating system beneath all of their choices, including the ones that lead to addiction.

True recovery cannot be built on willpower alone, and it cannot be sustained by treating only the surface behavior. The path forward begins when we shift the fundamental question, not “What is wrong with me?” but “What happened to me?” That single reframing changes everything, replacing shame with curiosity, self-condemnation with compassion.

Trauma-informed approaches have shown genuine and lasting results. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps the brain reprocess traumatic memories that remain frozen and reactive. Somatic experiencing works directly with the body’s held tension and trauma responses, recognizing that the nervous system remembers what the mind has tried to forget. Internal Family Systems and inner-child work invite a gentler relationship with the wounded parts of the self that have been driving self-destructive behavior from the shadows.

As trauma is processed, not relived, but finally digested, the urgent need to self-medicate gradually loses its grip. Not because the memories disappear, but because they stop detonating in the present tense.

Recovery, at its deepest level, is not a return to who you were before the pain. It is the slow, non-linear discovery of who you are when you no longer need to run from yourself. It is learning that emotions, even the devastating ones, are not threats. They are information. Messengers, not enemies.

The goal is not to become someone who no longer hurts. It is to become someone who can be hurt without being destroyed, someone who has enough inner resource, support, and self-compassion to feel the full range of human experience without needing to escape it.

If you recognize yourself in these pages, understand this: your addiction does not define you, and it does not disqualify you from a different life. It is a response to pain that was too large to hold alone. And healing, real, lasting, embodied healing, becomes possible the moment you stop treating yourself as the problem, and start treating your pain as something that deserves to be heard.

Paul Mundt

Trauma & Recovery

Paul Mundt is one of the premiere trauma experts in the field. His unique “Workshop” approach has helped thousands deal with and overcome the life and relationship issues associated with trauma. On any given weekend, Paul can be found at one of the many residential treatment centers across the U.S. that he regularly travels to, delivering his lifesaving workshop.

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It is a real honor to be part of this first edition of The Art of Recovery, and I would like to open by thanking the founder, Mr. Mike O’Reilly, for the opportunity to be one of its inaugural contributors.

I want to use this piece to describe the state of addiction medicine and addiction treatment in the United States, and to do it from both sides at once. I am an addictionologist and a board-certified medical doctor. I am also a patient who is, himself, in recovery. That dual vantage gives me, I believe, a particular way of seeing this field: not as an abstract policy question, but as a road I have walked from both directions.

I am writing this from the County of Los Angeles, working alongside one of the strongest networks of addiction-treatment professionals in the country, in a moment when, for the first time in a generation, the deadliest overdose epidemic in American history is finally turning. Drug overdose deaths in the United States fell by approximately 27 percent in 2024 and have continued to decline through 2025, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that more than eighty lives are now being saved every single day, compared to the peak. Here in Los Angeles County, drug overdose deaths fell 22 percent in 2024, the largest single-year decline in our county’s history, and fentanyl-specific deaths dropped 37 percent. These are not abstract statistics. They are the direct, measurable consequence of work that physicians, public-health officials, harm-reduction outreach teams, and recovery communities have been doing, often invisibly, for years. The science of addiction medicine is mature. The treatments work. The deaths are coming down. Lives are being saved.

I lead with that because much of what follows will sound, on the surface, like a list of difficulties. It is. The walk to where we are now has been long, slow, and harder than it ever needed to be, for patients, for families, and for the physicians who do this work. But the difficulties are the surface. Underneath them is something very simple and very good. The field has grown up. It is still growing. I want to tell you both stories, but I want to be honest that the good one is the deeper one.

The specialty of addiction medicine traces its roots to 1954, when Dr. Ruth Fox and a group of like-minded physicians, meeting at the New York Academy of Medicine, founded the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism. That small society, built by physicians who were themselves convinced that alcoholism deserved to be understood as a disease rather than a moral failing, grew over the following decades. It became the American Medical Society on Alcoholism, then, in 1989, the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), which is today the professional home for physicians in this field.

Standardized clinical guidelines did not begin to coalesce until the 1990s and 2000s. The formal moment of arrival, the moment American medicine officially named addiction medicine as one of its subspecialties, came only in 2016, when the American Board of Medical Specialties recognized it under the auspices of the American Board of Preventive Medicine.

That is a long road. Sixty-two years between the first physicians who took alcoholism seriously as a medical condition and the field receiving full institutional standing. We are now in 2026. It is essentially only in this last decade that the medical mainstream has fully accepted what Ruth Fox and her colleagues already understood seventy years ago: that addiction is a disease, not a moral failure, not a deficiency of will, not a character flaw, and that it deserves to be treated with the same scientific seriousness as any other chronic illness.

Addiction is a disease, not a moral failure, not a deficiency of will, not a character flaw.

That conceptual shift, slow as it was, is the foundation underneath everything that is now going right.

I finished medical school in 2006. In four years of training, I had exactly one hour of formal instruction in addiction medicine. One hour. In that single hour, a physician practicing in Manhattan came to our school in Brooklyn and shared his own story, how he had developed alcohol use disorder, and how that disease had reshaped his life and his career.

Little did I know, sitting in that audience, that I would be one of the students destined to walk a version of his path myself. But that one hour, that one physician’s quiet honesty in front of a room of skeptical students, was the entirety of my pre-clinical exposure to the disease that would, much later, become the center of my work.

When I speak with colleagues today who lead residency programs and medical school curricula, I am told that very little has changed. Depending on the institution, an entire four-year medical education may still contain only a handful of hours devoted to addiction. This, in a country where substance use disorder is among the most common, most lethal, and most expensive chronic conditions we treat. It remains, to me, one of the more bizarre facts about modern American medical training.

Things did not immediately improve in internal medicine residency. During those years, patients with addiction were too often not welcome in our emergency rooms. They were dismissed, by tired residents on long shifts, as “drug addicts” and “alcoholics,” and there was less respect shown for that patient population than there ever should have been. I share this not as an accusation, but as an honest record of where the field was. The whole basis of being a physician is to treat every patient with respect, regardless of who they are or what disease they carry, and that ethic, applied honestly, should always have included people with addiction.

It was, in a quiet way, as if the medical system were telling those patients: You know what, because you developed this disease, you must somehow be a bad person. You brought this on yourself. The rest is your problem. No one would ever say that to a patient with diabetes, or hypertension, or any other chronic disease driven by a tangle of genetic predisposition, environment, and behavior. No physician would think it. And yet, for patients with addiction, something very close to that was the implicit message for a long time.

The field has, in the years since, started to outgrow that. That growth, slow, generational, uneven across institutions, is one of the things I am most grateful for.

I want to be honest about where the path still meets friction, because each of these points is a place where, with a little more attention and a little more imagination, the experience of being a patient, or a physician, in this field could be made significantly more humane.

Stigma remains the single largest obstacle. Even in 2026, addiction is still treated in too many places as a moral problem rather than a medical one. This is not just an abstract attitude. It shows up in insurance coverage, in clinical encounters, in family conversations, in patients’ own self-image. It is the force most directly within our reach to change, because it lives in language, in habit, and in the small daily decisions of how we speak to and about people with this disease.

The criminal justice system has been carrying weight that medicine should have carried. For most of the last half-century, since the formal launch of the War on Drugs in 1971, addiction in the United States was treated primarily as a criminal matter. We jailed people for what was, fundamentally, a disease. The legacy of that approach is everywhere: in the racial inequities that grew out of decades of enforcement, in the gaps in treatment infrastructure in communities that were policed instead of served, and in the cultural memory that still equates addiction with crime. The shift toward medical treatment is real and accelerating, but the residue is real too.

The treatment gap is enormous, and it is closing slowly. According to the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, approximately 48.4 million Americans aged twelve or older, about one in six of us, meet diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder in any given year. Only about 10.2 million received any treatment for it in 2024. Roughly eighty percent of those who need help do not get it. Among adults with opioid use disorder specifically, fewer than one in five receive the medications that the scientific evidence clearly shows would help them. The tools exist. Access has not yet caught up.

Many treatment facilities were not built around physicians. Most addiction treatment facilities in this country are run not by clinicians, but by businesspeople, or by individuals who themselves went through recovery and went on to own facilities. Many of these facilities do meaningful, often life-saving work, and I want to be careful not to flatten their contribution. But some still decline to offer Medication-Assisted Treatment on ideological grounds, even when federal regulations, the scientific evidence, and basic humanity all point the other direction. The architecture of the industry was simply not designed with the treating physician at the center of care.

The payment system is structurally awkward, but solvable. Most patients with substance use disorder in the United States do not carry private insurance; they rely on Medicaid, or in California specifically on Medi-Cal, to fund their treatment. And here is the structural piece that most people outside the field do not see: programs like Medi-Cal generally contract with treatment facilities rather than directly with physicians. Even where dedicated funding for physician services exists, and in Los Angeles County, it does exist, at genuinely competitive rates, that funding flows first to a facility, which then decides whether to hire a physician at all and how much of the dedicated physician funding the physician actually receives. This creates a strange situation in which the need for medical expertise is enormous, the trained physicians are few, and the money intended for physician services often does not reach the physician who provides them.

None of these things mean the field is broken. They mean the field still has work to do. And the work is well within reach of the people now entering this profession.

Here is something I want the reader to hold in mind, because I think it captures, in a single image, where we actually are.

I am sitting in the County of Los Angeles, working in what I sincerely consider one of the most thoughtfully run addiction-treatment systems in the United States, the county’s Substance Abuse Prevention and Control program, which in 2024 scaled up investment in prevention, treatment, and harm reduction by more than 260 percent, 275 percent, and 500 percent respectively. The result, in one year, was the largest single-year decline in overdose deaths in the history of our county. And yet, even here, in one of the best-resourced systems in the country, in the middle of an ongoing crisis that still claims roughly six to eight Angelenos every single day; I personally, as a board-certified addiction medicine physician, consistently have to work to find sustained, fulfilling clinical positions in the field.

There are not enough doctors. The demand is overwhelming.

That is the paradox of this specialty at this moment in history. There are not enough doctors. The demand is overwhelming. Real, dedicated funding for physician work exists. And the architecture of how that funding flows still keeps the trained physician one or two steps removed from the patient and from the dollar. Fixing this, opening direct contracting pathways for addiction medicine physicians, reforming credentialing for Medi-Cal and managed-care plans, building treatment programs that are designed around clinical care rather than around real estate and administrative overhead, is exactly the kind of work the next generation of clinicians and administrators can do together. None of it is impossible. Most of it is a matter of will.

Now to the deeper story.

The science of addiction has matured faster in the last fifteen years than at any previous moment in the specialty’s history. The neurobiology of reward, motivation, and craving is better understood than it has ever been. Medication-Assisted Treatment, using buprenorphine, methadone, naltrexone, and a growing list of allied medications, is now widely recognized as the most evidence-supported intervention available for opioid use disorder, with research consistently showing that these medications cut the risk of overdose death roughly in half. The federal Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act of 2022 eliminated the so-called X-Waiver requirement, allowing any clinician with a DEA registration to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid use disorder without a separate, additional license. Access is wider than it has ever been.

Naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal medication most patients and families know as Narcan, is now available over the counter at pharmacies across the country, in vending machines, and through community distribution programs that put it directly into the hands of the people most likely to use it. The most thoughtful researchers in the field believe the recent national decline in overdose deaths is driven largely by exactly this combination: wider access to medications for opioid use disorder, mass distribution of naloxone, and the slow, hard, often invisible work of the people who built this infrastructure piece by piece.

The professional pipeline is also beginning to fill. I recently returned from the American Society of Addiction Medicine national conference, and most of the colleagues I spoke with there were not yet board-certified addiction medicine physicians. They were family medicine and internal medicine doctors, exploring whether to bring addiction medicine into their practices or to become formally affiliated with the field. Each of those physicians represents a future point of care that did not exist a year ago. That is exactly the inflow this field has needed for a long time.

New therapies, new digital health tools, new integrated care models, and a slow generational shift in how the broader medical profession sees this disease are all converging at the same moment. The methodological and technological possibilities for making this work more human, for meeting each patient where they actually are, with what they actually need, have never been broader.

The field could have been built around the patient from the beginning. It was not. But it is being rebuilt that way now, in real time. And the people doing that rebuilding are exactly the readers of a magazine like this one.

I am very, very optimistic. I am proud to be part of this work, at this moment, in this place. I intend to keep fighting, every day, to improve access, improve care, and improve the experience of being a patient in this field.

I am also aware that most of the people reading this magazine will be reading it from somewhere other than California, from other counties, other states, other systems, other corners of the country where the picture on the ground may look very different from the one I have just described. I would very much like to hear from you. Please write in. The only way this field gets better, faster, is if the people doing the work share what they are actually seeing.

Thank you again to Mr. O’Reilly and to The Art of Recovery for the opportunity to open this conversation. There is much more to say, and I look forward to continuing it in the issues to come.

Dr. Andrei Dokukin, MD

Addiction Medicine Physician · Los Angeles

Dr. Andrei Dokukin, MD, is a board-certified addiction medicine physician in Los Angeles whose integrative practice bridges Western and ancient medicine. A former dancer (Bolshoi Ballet Academy, American Ballet Theatre), he trained in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Interventional Spine Medicine before walking out of conventional pain management, unwilling to treat chronic pain with opioids that only made it worse. His own path through professional crisis, alcoholism, and a near-death experience led him to recovery; now five years sober, his true passion is Addiction Medicine. He is also a pioneer of FDA-approved Hirudotherapy, medicinal leech medicine, in the United States.

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Let me start with a confession that will either make you like me or absolutely hate me: I don’t technically need to work. Not because I’m some Silicon Valley genius who cracked the algorithm, but because I had the good sense to be born into the right family, which, as anyone who’s ever received a trust fund knows, is the only real skill that requires absolutely no effort whatsoever.

This has been, as they say in therapy, a “mixed blessing.” On one hand: freedom. On the other hand: crippling boredom. And as anyone who’s spent a significant chunk of their life in and around the substance abuse world can tell you, boredom paired with unlimited free time is a combination that has launched more than a few questionable life chapters.

Drugs came in and out of my life for about fifteen years. Not in a dramatic, VH1 “Behind the Music” kind of way, more like a recurring houseguest who outstayed their welcome, left, came back, ate your food, left again. And here’s the thing that puzzled everyone around me, including actual addiction professionals who probably spent six figures on their degrees: when I wanted to stop, I stopped. Just like that. Cold turkey. Done.

I’d have some moment, a scare, a revelation, something I didn’t like, and I’d make a deal with myself: “not for a while.” And that was that. The deal held. My fellow partiers found this baffling, bordering on offensive. The reactions ranged from generous to unhinged:

“You’ve never actually been addicted if you can just quit.”

“You don’t have the addictive gene.”

“You didn’t use enough.”

“But by the grace of God.”

“You are in denial.”

That last one was a personal favorite. The implication being: the most reasonable interpretation of my ability to not use drugs is that something is deeply wrong with me. Denial dressed up as a compliment.

But rather than take offense, I got curious. I started asking questions: What exactly do they do in rehab? Why is stopping so agonizing for some people and not others? Does anyone in the treatment industry actually know what’s going on? Is there real science behind it, or is it mostly vibes, group shares, and laminated motivational posters in the bathroom?

These questions launched a five-year experiment I can only describe as going native. I wanted to see the industry from the inside, not as a patient, since I’d never been to treatment, but as someone on the actual payroll. Over five years, I worked at seven treatment centers as a Behavioral Health Technician. Seven. That’s not a typo. I have the W-2s to prove it, though a few of those facilities made me seriously question whether tax documentation was something they prioritized.

The treatment industry is staffed largely by people in recovery. This is, genuinely, both its greatest strength and its most persistent problem. The passion is absolutely real; I never doubted that for a moment. But passion and clinical competence are two very different things, and the industry has a long, comfortable habit of treating one as a substitute for the other. You can be moved to tears by someone’s struggle to get sober and still have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. These things are not mutually exclusive.

This is also, in case you hadn’t noticed, a business. Like all businesses, some operators are honest and some are not. Some are genuinely trying to help people; others are primarily trying to maximize revenue per bed. Many of the Business Development reps, the people responsible for bringing clients through the door, were not, across my seven stops, people I would describe as trustworthy. I say this with all the warmth I can summon: if your BD rep is telling you something that sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. File that one away.

Therapists, I discovered, are cliquey in a way that would feel right at home in a middle school cafeteria. Owners tended toward the flaky. The decisions being made at the facility level, operational, clinical, structural, often had less internal logic than a Magic 8-Ball consultation. Rules, when I traced them back to their origins, were almost invariably designed to make the staff’s job easier, not to improve anyone’s outcomes. The clients were an afterthought to the comfort of the schedule.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough: there are a staggering number of people from Oklahoma in California treatment centers. I’m not sure what’s happening in Oklahoma, but someone with a research grant should really look into it.

Every facility I worked at, without a single exception, described itself on its website as “evidence-based” and claimed to be among the most successful programs in the country. I worked at seven of them. They were staffed inconsistently, managed inconsistently, and delivered care that was, being charitable, inconsistent. When everyone is the best, the word stops meaning anything, which, come to think of it, may be precisely the point.

When I heard this magazine was being launched, I reached out to Mike O’Reilly and told him what I wanted to write. He was enthusiastic, with one firm condition: I am not allowed to name any facility I have anything negative to say about.

Which means Serenity Lodge is the only facility getting a mention, since Mike was the Executive Director there during my time on staff. I have genuinely warm memories of his office, specifically the steady supply of candy bars he kept stocked for clients. It was, in retrospect, the single most effective therapeutic intervention I witnessed across all seven of my stops. Nobody left that office worse off than when they walked in.

A few of the observations below were, I’ll admit, first pointed out to me by Mike himself. So if any of this makes you uncomfortable, feel free to direct your complaints to the editor.

Here is something I observed with near-perfect consistency across every facility I worked in. Clients arrive in roughly two varieties, and staff, clinical and operational alike, respond to each with the kind of scripted predictability usually reserved for airline safety demonstrations.

Type One: The Confident Client. This person walks in like they’ve figured something out. They’re articulate, upbeat, and completely convinced that this time is the time. They have plans. They have energy. They speak in full sentences and make eye contact. They present, in short, like someone who might actually succeed.

Type Two: The Beaten Client. This person was dragged to the door by circumstances, gravity, or a family member who finally reached their limit. They don’t want to be there. They expect to fail. They’re half-apologizing for how this is going to go before they’ve even filled out the intake paperwork.

Now here is what happens next, and I want you to really sit with how perfectly backwards it is:

The confident client is almost immediately told that their confidence isn’t real. A clinician, sometimes several, in what can only be described as a clinical pile-on, will informally but loudly diagnose them as a narcissist. I should mention that actual narcissistic personality disorder affects somewhere between 1% and 6% of the adult population. In treatment centers, the diagnosis appeared to approach 100% for anyone who showed up not completely devastated by their own existence.

Confidence gets pathologized. Optimism becomes a symptom.

The beaten client, meanwhile, gets the full inspirational treatment. “You’ve got this. This is the one. Look at everything you’ve overcome. You are stronger than you know.” The cheerleading is genuine, the energy is lovely, and, critically, it is deployed almost exclusively for the person who just walked in and announced they expect to fail.

My question, which I asked at multiple facilities and received no satisfying answer to, is simple: why?

Why can’t someone be confident? What happened to positive self-expectancy? To building on what’s already working? If a client walks in already believing they can win, why is your first clinical instinct to dismantle that belief rather than reinforce it? You can still give solid advice. You can still warn them not to turn their back on the bear in the cage. You can do all of that and also support their sense of agency at the same time.

Instead, confidence gets pathologized. Optimism becomes a symptom. And the system quietly rewards the people who arrive broken, because at least those people fit the narrative everyone already prepared before they walked through the door.

I found this troubling. I still do. And I have many more observations to come from all seven facilities.

Mike’s rules mean I can’t name six of them. Which honestly makes some of these stories more fun to tell.

Stay tuned.

Cyril Beck

Field Notes · From the Inside

Cyril Beck is a San Diego-based skateboarder, Behavioral Health Technician, and self-described observer of life, people, and nature. Raised with a degree of financial comfort but drawn toward service, Beck has spent years trying to understand addiction from both personal experience and inside the treatment industry. After a long history of drug use, including hard drugs, he became curious about why he was often able to stop while many friends could not. That question led him to work in seven treatment facilities over the last five years, where he has witnessed both the beauty and the failures of modern recovery care. His perspective is observational, unpolished, and deeply human: less about answers, more about paying attention to what actually helps people come back to themselves.

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Crunch, crunch, crunch? What am I involuntarily crunching on? More crunching… sand? Hmm, feels too rough, not soft and fine for sand. Dirt? Doesn’t taste “earthy,” and again not soft. Did one of my teeth fall out? Is that what I am crunching? Fear strikes me and starts to jolt me into a startled alertness. As I become conscious, yet in a fight-or-flight manner, I try to discern what is happening.

I try to lick my lips but there is no moisture for that. Bone dry. My mouth is as dry as the Sahara Desert; I imagine this is what camels feel like when they haven’t had a sip of water in days. The lack of saliva is making the foreign substance in my mouth ever more apparent, and yet I cannot even spit it out in my current state. What am I crunching on? It’s so bright out that I really can’t open my eyes, but I need to! Where am I?

“Dear God, I know I’ve asked this too many times and my words mean nothing, but please HELP me. I promise to be better. I promise to not drink ever again. I promise to not lie. I promise. I promise. God, what have I done? Where have I been? Where am I now? Where have the last 16 hours gone? Why am I alone? Please help, I am begging you.”

The sun beating down on the left side of my face ends my prayer abruptly, because it is burning hot and my skin is stuck to the ground. Do I dare lift my face? It will be like ripping off a band-aid, so I guess I should count to 3 and go for it! Ouch. I did it, and it felt just as I expected; I most definitely left some skin behind. The last thing I remember is walking out of our house in the early evening, and this sun feels like morning sun. I have been out all night? I am puzzled and have no memory, none.

Where am I, and where have I been, and what is the crunch in my mouth? As I come to a little more, the heat and dehydration welcome me with nausea. What I wouldn’t give for a sip of water. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was white sidewalk cement, and that’s precisely what it was. I have street gravel in my mouth, and I am flat out in the gutter, facing the sidewalk. Oddly, at this moment, one of my favorite lifetime quotes by Oscar Wilde comes to the forefront of my mind.

It goes like this: “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” I usually refer to this quote in a positive light and try to always be looking at the stars. But on this morning, the day after my wedding, my “honeymoon,” my first day of the rest of my life, I am not looking at the stars. I am flat out (no pun intended) in the gutter, with no stars in sight. All I can do is look up at the sky and pray some more.

I am flat out in the gutter, with no stars in sight.

What a wedding gift to my new husband I am. I am sure he has been awake all night searching for me, terrified of the whereabouts of his new wife. I have no phone, no way of communicating, and no idea exactly where I am or what has led me here to the gutter. To say this is a new low would be an understatement, both physically and mentally. The immediate rush of shame, guilt, and embarrassment hits me like a 30-foot tidal wave! I am awake now, with a flood of emotions and from all my senses. I know I must try to get up and get home, but the fear of what I face at home makes me want to just stay here in this dehydrated, nauseous, dangerous, and shameful state.

I peel myself up off the gravel and wipe the grit out of my mouth with my sleeve. My clothes are not only disheveled but wet (from sweat, I think), dirty, and torn. Every inch of my body hurts, proving that I didn’t lie down in the gutter with class; I clearly fell to this trashy position like only a good drunk would. My knees have fresh scrapes (like raspberries) tattooed on them like battle wounds. A battle, all right, a war with myself that I am not winning. It stings in more ways than one.

I try to get my bearings, dust myself off, and begin to recognize the neighborhood. A very brief feeling of glee overcomes me as I realize that I am merely blocks away from my honeymoon home, the home that was going to be a fresh start, a new way of life… one without alcohol. My first night (or was it technically my first night, since I didn’t sleep there?) blew that dream out of the water.

A battle, all right, a war with myself that I am not winning.

All I can do now is drag myself home, with my head down and my tail between my legs. I wish I was anywhere, and anyone, but me right now. Every imaginable reaction from my husband storms my mind as my anxiety reaches new highs. The only silver lining is that the anxiety outweighs the nausea. This is not your typical walk of shame, like the ones you have in college, walking home from the fraternity on a Saturday morning with an embarrassed but naive smile on your face. This brings the shame in “walk of shame” to a whole new light.

I timidly make my way up our steps to our front door and notice the wooden sign my father handmade for us as a wedding gift, to brand our new home as ours: “The Barn Swallows” (a sweet inside family joke). One that also meant many little bare feet would one day run in and out under this family sign.

Today, I have deviated from the traditional “carrying your bride over the threshold,” where the groom scoops up his bride and carries her through the doorway as they enter their new home on the night of their wedding. As with most wedding traditions, this custom dates back to the ancient Romans. Often a bride did not want to leave her parents’ home, so she was dragged by her new groom over the threshold of her new husband’s home. It also appeared more lady-like if a bride resisted entering the bedchamber; her husband would encourage her by carrying her inside.

It was also believed that evil spirits would target a bride even after her wedding was completed, and that brides were extra vulnerable on the soles of their feet. So ancient grooms would carry brides into their new home, so that evil spirits did not enter through a bride’s feet and follow the couple inside. Here I was, literally carrying the devil into our new home. The evil “spirits” (aka liquor) had taken hold of me, and the grip was tight.

Deep breath; it was time to face the music. I fearfully turn the doorknob and step over the “threshold” alone, defeated, and tattered. There he sat. He looked up at me with a mixture of relief, disappointment, and despair. With tears streaming down my face, I utter the words, “happy honeymoon, honey.”

Grace Rogers

Co-Founder & CMO · The Art of Recovery

Grace Rogers is Co-Founder and CMO for The Art of Recovery Magazine, a marketing executive, brand architect, and community connector with more than 35 years building iconic brands across fashion, lifestyle, and behavioral health. A founding executive of ROXY and creator of “b by Burton,” she has spent the past decade in the substance abuse and mental health space, building referral networks, elevating treatment brands, and leading a Southern California behavioral-health networking community of more than 800 members. A Newport Beach native, she lives in Costa Mesa with her teenage son and their two dogs, grateful for the journey that continues to unfold.

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Let me ask you something honest.

You’ve been in the rooms. You’ve done the steps. You’ve sat across from a therapist, worked a program, read the books, tried the affirmations, built the routines. Maybe you’ve even strung together real time, months, years. And still, somewhere beneath the sobriety, beneath the structure, beneath everything you’ve constructed to hold yourself together, there’s something that hasn’t fully shifted. A feeling you can’t name. A voice that still says you’re not enough. A pull that returns every time life gets too quiet, too close, or too real.

You’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re looking through a dirty lens. And until that lens is cleaned, not managed, not medicated, not white-knuckled, you will keep seeing the same distorted picture, no matter how many times you change the scenery.

That is what this work is about.

Real recovery is not about stopping a behavior. It is about rebuilding the architecture of self.

Your brain receives approximately eleven million bits of information every second. Your conscious mind can process roughly forty. That means the vast majority of what you experience as “reality”, what you believe about yourself, what you feel you deserve, what you expect from people, what feels safe and what feels dangerous, is being filtered through a system you did not consciously choose.

This system was built early. Before language. Before logic. Before you had any capacity to question it. It was built from experiences, from what the adults around you communicated about your value, from moments of connection and disconnection, from pain that didn’t get witnessed and needs that didn’t get met. By the time you were seven years old, the core architecture of your perceptual lens was largely in place, running silently, continuously, and almost entirely outside your awareness.

I call this the Lens of Perception. And what I’ve seen across a decade of working in rehabilitation centers, running groups, and sitting with people in private practice is this: addiction is never just about the substance. The substance, the behavior, the compulsion, whatever form it takes, is a response to a lens that has been distorted from the inside. A lens shaped by one foundational, relentless belief:

Or some version of it: I am too much. I am unlovable. I am unsafe. I don’t belong. My needs are a burden. I have to earn love. I have to be perfect to deserve anything.

These are not random thoughts. They are the invisible destination that the whole system keeps navigating back toward, GPS coordinates written into the subconscious long before you had any say in it. And until those coordinates change, every tool, every technique, every meeting, and every milestone will be working against a current that runs much deeper than the behavior.

This is why I created the ACT Framework (Awareness, Cleansing, and Transformation) and why the book I’ve been writing, Cleanse Your Lens of Perception, is built around a single, non-negotiable truth:

When we talk about what addiction does to a person, we usually talk about the body, the relationships, the finances, the trust. What we rarely talk about, what sits underneath all of it, is what happened to the self.

Not the behavior. Not the choices. The self.

Before the addiction was a coping strategy, there was a person whose core sense of worth was compromised. Whose self-esteem became contingent on performance, approval, usefulness, or invisibility. Whose relationship with themselves, with their own emotions, their own needs, their own inner world, was severed, suppressed, or simply never developed in the first place. The addiction was the system’s best available answer to that rupture. It numbed the pain. It created a momentary sense of belonging, power, or relief. It managed what had become unmanageable.

To understand why that matters, I find it essential to distinguish between three things that recovery culture often collapses into one:

Self-worth is the bedrock. It is the unconditional sense that you have inherent value, not because of what you’ve done, what you produce, how you look, how useful you are, or whether people approve of you. It is your fundamental right to exist and belong, unchanged by circumstance. For most people struggling with addiction, this is where the damage is deepest. Not at the surface. At the root.

Self-esteem grows from the ground of self-worth, but it is earned, not assumed. It is the confidence that comes from acting in alignment with your values, from following through, from telling the truth, from making a difficult choice and staying with it. Healthy self-esteem is not “I feel good about myself because people like me.” It is “I respect myself because I know what I stood for in the hard moment.”

Self-love is not a feeling you manufacture. It is not an affirmation you recite. It is the lived practice of no longer exiling any part of yourself. It is, at its deepest, the willingness to belong to yourself fully, without condition. Not the sentimental version. Not the Instagram version. The structural, unflinching, sometimes uncomfortable kind that looks directly at the darkest parts of the inner world and says: You are not the enemy. I see you. You don’t have to fight for survival in here anymore.

These three are not separate destinations. They are one architecture. And the reason so many people can achieve sustained sobriety without ever feeling truly free is that the architecture was never rebuilt from the inside. The lens was polished on the outside. The distortions underneath remained intact.

Here is what the distorted lens actually does: it filters reality to confirm whatever the system has already concluded about the self.

The brain’s Reticular Activating System, the neurological gatekeeper that determines what information reaches consciousness, is programmed to prove you right about whatever you already believe. If the core belief is I am not enough, your brain will spotlight every criticism, every failure, every moment of rejection, while filtering out praise, success, and contradictory evidence. Not because you’re choosing to be miserable. Because the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: create consistency between the inner world and the outer experience.

This is why positive thinking so rarely creates lasting change on its own. You cannot overlay a new belief on top of an old emotional charge and expect the system to update. The subconscious processes eleven million bits per second. The conscious mind processes forty. It is not a fair fight. And the part that wins is always the one with the deeper wiring.

This is also why a person can stop using, stay clean, rebuild their life, and still feel, in their quietest moments, like a fraud. Like the version of them standing in the meeting is performing recovery while the actual self is still crouched in the same shame it’s always lived in.

That experience is not failure. It is information. It is the system communicating that the architecture hasn’t changed yet, only the behavior.

Inside every person who has struggled with addiction lives not one self, but many. This is not pathology. This is how the human psyche organizes itself in response to pain that was too much to integrate at the time.

Carl Jung called these the shadow, the parts of the self that get exiled because they were deemed unacceptable, dangerous, or too vulnerable to survive in the environment they were born into. Internal Family Systems calls them parts: managers who keep the system controlled and presentable, firefighters who rush in to douse emotional pain at any cost, and exiles, the young, wounded aspects of self who carry the original shame, grief, terror, or loneliness that started the whole architecture in the first place.

The addictive part is almost always a firefighter. And it is, without question, one of the most misunderstood members of the inner system.

Think about it. Has your addictive part ever failed to accomplish its mission? It always knew who to call. It always knew what to do. No matter what it took, it got you what it believed you needed to survive. That’s not a defective part. That is a fiercely loyal part with an extraordinary work ethic, working from a job description written in pain, long before you had any other options.

The problem isn’t the intensity of its drive. The problem is the direction that drive has been pointed. And the solution isn’t to exile it. The solution is to reclaim it, to say, with genuine respect: I see what you were protecting. I understand why you came. And now I’m stepping into leadership, because there’s a better way to meet these needs.

This is where shadow work and parts integration become not supplementary but essential. Because every time we shame a part instead of understanding it, we deepen the original wound. We reinforce the belief that certain aspects of the self must remain hidden in order to be acceptable. And that belief, that conditional, earned, performance-based version of belonging, is the very core of the architecture we are trying to transform.

Self-love that is genuinely structural, not sentimental, is built precisely here. In the moment when the inner system learns that no part of it needs to earn its right to exist.

The distortions in the lens don’t live only in the mind. They live in the body. They live in the energy field. And genuine cleansing requires working at every level where the distortion has taken root.

At the neurological level, trauma and emotional wounding create measurable changes in the brain. The amygdala becomes hypersensitive, reading threat into neutral situations. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for nuanced thinking, self-regulation, and choice, gets hijacked the moment old emotional patterns are activated. This is why people can know, intellectually, exactly why they are reacting and still be unable to stop. Understanding is a conscious process. The wound is running from the subconscious.

At the somatic level, the body stores what the mind cannot process. Incomplete trauma responses live in the muscles, the fascia, the breath. The nervous system holds onto old states of emergency long after the original emergency has passed, keeping the body in low-grade fight, flight, or freeze that signals ongoing danger to the brain even when nothing dangerous is present. In this physiological state, the addictive part doesn’t just knock. It walks in. Because the body is already living as if the worst is about to happen.

At the energetic level, and this is where I am drawing from both ancient healing traditions and emerging biofield science, unresolved emotional experiences leave signatures in the subtle body. Grief in the heart center. Unexpressed truth in the throat. Shame in the solar plexus, fragmenting the very seat of personal power and self-worth. Energy modalities, including Reiki, work at this level, clearing residue that talk therapy and even somatic work sometimes cannot reach alone.

These are not competing perspectives. They are three languages describing the same truth from different altitudes. And the ACT Framework is designed to work at all three, because anything less than that will leave parts of the distortion intact.

Here is the hardest truth in all of recovery work, and I offer it with complete compassion for how challenging it is to hear:

Because the behavior was never the problem. It was the answer to the problem. And the problem, the original wound, the distorted belief, the architecture built around the conviction that you are fundamentally not enough, will keep generating new answers if it remains untouched. A different compulsion. A different relationship dynamic. A different form of the same reaching for what was never given freely from within.

This is what I mean by the architecture of self. It is not enough to change what you do. The transformation has to reach the level of who you believe yourself to be. It has to reach the level of what you believe you are worth.

In the Transformation section of my book, I walk through what I call the alchemy of identity, the process of recognizing that the self that has been protected, performed, and defended is not actually who you are. It is an adaptive structure. An intelligent, understandable, even loyal structure, but one organized around survival, not truth.

And at some point in this journey, the real question emerges:

This is where the architecture begins to rebuild. First the self-worth, not earned, but reclaimed. The understanding that value was never something you had to manufacture or prove. It was always there, obscured by the layers of distortion laid down over it. Then the self-esteem, rebuilt not through achievement but through values-aligned action, through following through on small honest commitments, through discovering what it feels like to stand behind yourself. And finally the self-love, structural, unconditional, the product of a system that has stopped requiring any part of itself to earn belonging before it’s allowed in the room.

This is not a soft or sentimental process. It is the most challenging and most courageous work a human being can undertake. Because it means sitting inside the disorientation of becoming someone new while the old identity still holds gravitational pull. It means tolerating the in-between, no longer fully who you were, not yet fully who you are becoming, without running back to the familiar even when the familiar was painful.

The nervous system often prefers a known prison to an unknown freedom. Predictability, even when it hurts, can feel safer than possibility. This is why transformation requires not just insight, but repetition. Not of affirmations, but of lived choices, small, consistent, values-grounded moments that build new evidence in the body for who you are becoming.

In groups and in private practice, I work from the full architecture of the human being, neurological, emotional, somatic, energetic, and relational.

We use Parts Work and shadow integration to meet the inner cast of characters that has been running the show. Not to exile them. To understand them. To thank the addictive part for its decades of service and give it a new assignment. To finally hear the wounded inner child who wasn’t heard at the time. To let the inner critic find its rightful role as discernment rather than condemnation.

We use somatic practices and breathwork because the body must be part of the healing; you cannot think your way out of something that isn’t living in your thoughts. We use hypnotherapy to access and update the subconscious programming directly, at the level where it actually runs. We use NLP to shift the structure of internal experience. We use energy work to clear what remains at the field level. And we anchor all of it in the neuroscience, the attachment research, the clinical evidence, because this work is not mystical, even when it is profound.

And through all of it, the through-line is always the same:

You are not here to become a more successful version of someone who doesn’t use. You are here to become the truest version of yourself, the one that was present before the wound, before the adaptation, before the lens got dirty.

Recovery, at its deepest, is a restoration. Not to perfection. Not to a self without shadow or struggle or the ongoing need for honest maintenance. But to a self that knows its worth, not because that worth was earned or validated or proven to someone else, but because it was reclaimed.

The lens can be cleansed. The architecture can be rebuilt. Self-worth, self-esteem, and self-love are not luxuries reserved for people who had easier childhoods or smoother lives. They are the foundation of every lasting transformation I have ever witnessed. They are not the reward at the end of recovery. They are the engine that makes recovery real.

Ali Sotoodeh

Life Coach · Hypnotherapist · NLP Practitioner

Ali Sotoodeh is a Life Coach, Hypnotherapist, and NLP Practitioner based in Los Angeles. He works across multiple rehabilitation centers as a hypnotherapist, counselor, and group facilitator, and maintains a private practice centered on deep transformational work. His signature program, Cleanse Your Lens of Perception, is built on the ACT Framework (Awareness, Cleansing, and Transformation) and integrates neuroscience, somatic practice, IFS parts work, shadow integration, NLP, hypnotherapy, and energy-based modalities including Reiki. His book of the same name is forthcoming.

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For years, I heard people talk about gratitude, and honestly, it confused me.

I was surrounded by people who had plenty to be grateful for, big houses, success, expensive cars, status, and recognition in their fields, yet most of them were miserable. Nothing ever seemed to satisfy them. No achievement was enough. They suffered from what I now call the “Never Satisfied, Never Enough Syndrome.”

I understood that mindset because I lived it too.

Before I got sober, I was never truly present. Cocaine and alcohol kept me disconnected from my life, my accomplishments, and the people around me. No matter what I achieved, I always felt restless, dissatisfied, and chasing the next thing.

Everything changed on April 16, 2006, when I removed cocaine and alcohol from my life.

One day after a 12-step meeting, I went to lunch with a mentor. As he looked through the menu, he became genuinely excited that the café offered freshly squeezed juices made to order. I remember thinking, Why is this guy so happy about juice? All I wanted was to slam down three double espressos and rush to the gym.

A few weeks later, it finally clicked.

I had taken a newcomer, someone counting days sober, out for coffee after a meeting. Early recovery is brutal. Your emotions feel amplified, and your mind races constantly. When I asked him what he wanted, he just stared at the menu, overwhelmed and uncertain.

As I opened the menu, the first thing I noticed was the same line: Freshly squeezed juices.

When we live in a constant state of irritation, anger, frustration, depression, or emotional chaos, we lose the ability to appreciate the small things. Gratitude isn’t something complicated. It’s simply the ability to appreciate what we have instead of obsessing over what we don’t.

Comparison destroys gratitude. It steals our joy and disconnects us from the present moment.

Today, every morning when I wake up, I take a moment to be grateful that I’m sober and that I have another day of life ahead of me.

Mike Diamond

Certified Addiction Recovery Expert

Mike Diamond is a Certified Addiction Recovery Expert, an interventionist on A&E’s Intervention (premiering June 24), and the author of A Dose of Positivity. He is a Nationally Certified Interventionist Professional (NCIP), a National Certified Case Manager (NCCM), a Nationally Certified Recovery Coach (NCRC), and a breath coach.

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What comes to mind when you hear the word recovery?

For many people, the word brings up images of addiction, treatment centers, interventions, twelve-step meetings, or someone who has reached the lowest point of their life. Recovery has become a word we often associate with crisis, shame, labels, and the moment when everything has fallen apart.

But what if we have made the word too small?

What if recovery is not only for the person who has lost everything? What if recovery is also for the person who has quietly begun to lose themselves?

The word recovery means to regain, restore, return, or get back something that was lost. We recover from illness. We recover after heartbreak. We recover a missing item. We recover our energy after a difficult season.

So why, when it comes to addictive behaviors, do we believe someone must wait until life becomes unbearable before they are allowed to begin getting themselves back?

In my book, Recovery Without Rock Bottom: Reclaim Your Life from Addictive Behaviors, I write:

That is the invitation I believe recovery offers us. Not a label. Not a punishment. Not evidence that we are broken. Recovery is a return to ourselves. It is the decision to reclaim our health, our relationships, our values, our purpose, our joy, and our power to choose a different path.

Traditional recovery models have saved countless lives. Treatment centers, therapy, peer support, twelve-step communities, medication-assisted treatment, and structured programs all have an essential place in helping individuals affected by addiction. For many, these supports are life-changing and life-saving.

But alongside these important supports, we also need a broader, more hopeful conversation about recovery.

There are many people who know a behavior is affecting their lives but still do not believe they are “bad enough” to need change. They may be functioning at work. They may still be maintaining relationships. From the outside, everything may look fine. Yet internally, something feels off. A substance or behavior may be taking more time, energy, attention, peace, or freedom than they want to give it.

They may think:

This is precisely where the word recovery needs to become more welcoming.

You do not have to wait until you lose everything to choose something better.

You do not have to hit rock bottom to decide that a pattern, habit, or behavior is no longer aligned with the life you want to live.

You do not have to be defined by a struggle in order to begin healing from it.

For a long time, conversations around recovery have understandably focused on stopping the harmful behavior: stopping the drinking, the drug use, the numbing, the compulsive pattern, or the habit that is causing harm.

But stopping is only part of the story.

A person also needs something to move toward.

This is where happiness studies and positive psychology offer a powerful addition to the recovery conversation. Positive psychology is not about pretending life is easy or simply “thinking positive.” It is the scientific study of the conditions that help human beings live well, including meaning, positive relationships, resilience, engagement, accomplishment, and hope.

Martin Seligman’s work on well-being reminds us that a fulfilling life is built through more than momentary pleasure. It grows through connection, meaning, engagement, positive emotion, and a sense of progress and accomplishment (Seligman, 2011).

These are not decorative extras in recovery. They are part of what makes change sustainable.

When someone begins rebuilding connection, purpose, health, meaning, and self-respect, recovery becomes more than deprivation. It becomes expansion.

Instead of asking only, What do I need to stop doing? We can also ask:

Recovery is not merely the absence of a destructive behavior. It is the presence of a life that supports your well-being.

Recovery is deeply personal, but it is not wishful thinking. The brain and human behavior are capable of change. Repeated habits can become deeply reinforced over time, particularly when substances or behaviors temporarily provide relief from pain, stress, anxiety, loneliness, or boredom. But learned patterns are not the same as permanent destinies.

Research-supported approaches to addiction and recovery increasingly recognize the importance of mindfulness, emotional regulation, cognitive reframing, healthy reward, meaning, and positive connection. For example, Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement combines mindfulness, cognitive reappraisal, and savoring skills, with research showing reductions in addictive behavior and emotional distress alongside increases in positive emotion and meaning in life (Garland, 2013; Garland et al., 2019).

This matters because it reinforces a hopeful truth: lasting change is not only about white-knuckling your way away from something harmful. It is also about learning new ways to cope, connect, experience pleasure, manage discomfort, and find meaning.

In Recovery Without Rock Bottom, I describe this as shifting the focus from avoiding what pulls you down to actively creating what lifts you up.

This is not about replacing treatment when treatment is needed. It is about expanding our understanding of recovery so that people feel invited into change sooner, supported more fully, and encouraged to build a life they genuinely want to protect.

I love thinking of recovery as re-covering yourself.

Over time, addictive behaviors can cover parts of who we are. They may cover our confidence with shame. They may cover our relationships with secrecy or distance. They may cover our dreams with exhaustion. They may cover our joy with a constant need for escape.

Recovery is the gentle and courageous work of uncovering what is still there.

You are not starting from nothing. You are returning to something valuable within yourself.

That does not mean recovery is simple. It does not mean we ignore pain, relapse, trauma, mental health, withdrawal, or the need for professional support. It means we refuse to define recovery only by struggle.

There is more to recover than what we stop doing.

There is a whole person waiting to come back into view.

Take a quiet moment and ask yourself:

Now ask:

It does not have to be dramatic. Change often begins quietly. A conversation. A meeting. A walk. A journal entry. An appointment. A boundary. A moment of honesty. One choice that says:

My life matters. My well-being matters. I am ready to begin getting myself back.

Recovery should not be a word that makes us shrink in shame. It should be a word filled with dignity, courage, strength, and hope.

Recovery is not proof that you have failed.

Recovery is proof that you are willing to choose again.

You do not have to wait for the worst day of your life to begin building a better one.

Recovery is for anyone ready to move toward something healthier, fuller, and more meaningful.

And perhaps, at its heart, recovery is simply this:

Andrea Seydel

Live Life Happy Recovery · Columnist

Andrea Seydel holds a degree in Psychology and a Master’s in Happiness Studies. She is a Positive Psychology Educator, Professional Certified Coach, and author of Recovery Without Rock Bottom: Reclaim Your Life from Addictive Behaviors and the Saving You Is Killing Me: Loving Someone with an Addiction book series.

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In her recurring column, Live Life Happy Recovery, Andrea explores recovery through books, happiness studies, resilience, and the science of rebuilding your life. Each month, she shares hopeful, practical, and evidence-informed insights to help individuals rediscover purpose, strengthen well-being, cultivate connection, and move toward a life that feels meaningful and worth living.